Architectures for Testing Distributed Systems

Ulrich, Andreas; König, Hartmut

doi:10.1007/978-0-387-35567-2_7

Cited by 39 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…There are specific questions of controllability in a distributed context [24], which deserve further study. Finally, it is tempting to refine the standard conformance relation based on sequential traces to a kind of partial order inclusion.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Principles of Distributed Test Synthesis Based on True-Concurrency Models

Jard

2002

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

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Automatic synthesis of test cases for conformance testing has been principally developed with the objective of generating sequential test cases. In the distributed system context, it is worth extending the synthesis techniques to the generation of multiple testers. We base our work on our experience in using model-checking techniques, as successfully implemented in the TGV tool. Continuing the works of A. Ulrich and H. Konig, we propose to use a trueconcurrency model based on graph unfolding. The article presents the principles of a complete chain of synthesis, starting from the definition of test purposes and ending with a projection onto a set of testers.Key words: Test, Distributed systems, Synthesis, True-concurrency models, Interoperability INTRODUCTIONAlgorithms for automatic test synthesis have been proposed both in the academic world, and in industry. However, the use of these tools reaches a limit when testing distributed systems. This is because they are dedicated to the synthesis of sequential test cases (represented by event sequences or finite automata). Such synthesis is not always well-suited to test systems containing parallel activities. It is also known that a state representation of a specification with parallelism often suffers from a combinatorial explosion. 302 TESTING DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMSThe interest in generating distributed test cases was recognised a few years ·ago, as demonstrated by the inclusion of concurrent constructs in the TTCN standard. We retain three main motivations to synthesise distributed test cases:It can be naturally imposed by the test architecture under consideration. Let us consider a system geographically scattered on a network. The idea is to design a set of testers, each tester being located at the communicating entity to be checked, and communicating with the other testers to co-ordinate the test activity and the production of diagnosis.It allows more compact and clear test cases to be obtained. This is the case when the system under test produces concurrent observable events: a sequential representation would require all possible interleavings to be computed. This rapidly suffers from a combinatorial explosion as the concurrency increases.In certain cases parallel testing is needed to check particular behaviours. For example, one often considers for controllability reasons that the testers must wait for the system stabilisation before injecting new interactions. Under this assumption, it was shown by [2] that a distributed test case can position the system under test into states which are not reachable by a sequential test. More generally, the situation will also occur in the context of real-time testing.One can distinguish two main approaches to synthesising distributed test cases:The generation of sequential test cases, followed by their automated distribution. The idea is to produce a set of communicating testers which behave like the sequential test (i.e. in the sense of trace equivalence). The advantage of this approach is that it requires no more th...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Principles of Distributed Test Synthesis Based on True-Concurrency Models

Jard

2002

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

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“…Since our concern in this paper is single-party testing context, we will not discuss multi-party testing issues any further. Interested readers can consult references [6,24] for further details on this topic. Also, [27] presents a good survey on distributed test architectures for protocol conformance testing according to CTMF and beyond.…”

Section: Conformance Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another related work is the one presented by A.W.Ulritch et al, where two test architectures for testing distributed systems were proposed: one based on a global tester that controls and observes all distributed components of a SUT in a central manner, another based on a distributed tester that consists of a number of distributed, concurrent tester components, each of them observing a partial behavior of the IUT [24]. The latter must provide a test coordination procedure to assure a consistent global view of the SUT, which comprises various IUT.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Tool for Fault Injection and Conformance Testing of Distributed Systems

Martins

Mattiello-Francisco

2003

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. This paper presents an approach for conformance testing and fault injection of distributed systems supported by a tool named FSoFIST (Ferry-clip with Software Fault Injection Support Tool). The approach extends the ferryclip concept to cope with fault injection. The ferry-clip concept was aimed at providing a highly modular, flexible and configurable architecture for protocol conformance testing. Due to these qualities, this architecture can be used for testing different protocol implementations with reduced effort. The work presents the design issues employed to achieve the ferry-injection architecture and describe the components of the proposed architecture. The capabilities of the approach are demonstrated in a case study used to validate the FSoFIST tool.

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“…In order to ensure that the global view on the SUT during testing can be inferred it is sufficient to introduce coordination messages into the partial test sequences executed by the testers. The complexity of the TCP increases with the number of testers since this introduces the cost of setting up the testers and the channels between these testers [18,19]. Once the test infrastructure is in place, the cost of sending individual messages between the testers may be very low in which case we want to minimize the cost of deploying the test infrastructure.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Overcoming controllability problems with fewest channels between testers

Hierons

Ural

2009

Computer Networks

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When testing a system that has multiple physically distributed ports/interfaces it is normal to place a tester at each port. Each tester observes only the events at its port and it is known that this can lead to additional controllability problems. While such controllability problems can be overcome by the exchange of external coordination messages between the testers, this requires the deployment of an external network and may thus increase the costs of testing. The problem studied in this paper is finding a minimum number of coordination channels to overcome controllability problems in distributed testing. Three instances of this problem are considered. The first problem is to find a minimum number of channels between testers in order to overcome the controllability problems in a given test sequence to be applied in testing. The second problem is finding a minimal set of channels that allow us to overcome controllability problems in any test sequence that may be selected from the specification of the system under test. The last problem is to find a test sequence that achieves a particular test objective and in doing so allows fewest channels to be used.

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Architectures for Testing Distributed Systems

Cited by 39 publications

References 10 publications

Principles of Distributed Test Synthesis Based on True-Concurrency Models

Principles of Distributed Test Synthesis Based on True-Concurrency Models

A Tool for Fault Injection and Conformance Testing of Distributed Systems

Overcoming controllability problems with fewest channels between testers

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